


i've got visions to make (and gold dust to find)

by inkstainedmemories



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Bakery, Alternate Universe - Magic, Angst, Baking, Fluff, Gen, Valentine's Day, baking with emotions (literally)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:07:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29443083
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkstainedmemories/pseuds/inkstainedmemories
Summary: In which Wilbur runs a bakery but never bakes, stresses over Valentine's Day, and somehow manages to find a family along the way.
Relationships: Niki | Nihachu & Wilbur Soot, No Romantic Relationship(s), Toby Smith | Tubbo & Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52
Collections: TWB Valentine's Event [2021]





	i've got visions to make (and gold dust to find)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [karmicpunishment](https://archiveofourown.org/users/karmicpunishment/gifts).



> happy valentine's day mel! i hope you enjoy <3
> 
> the concept of a magic bakery was loosely inspired by [when i sing, you sing harmonies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12468080), a wonderful (non-mcyt) work that i still think about 3 years after reading.
> 
> (title from diggin' - kovacs)

There’s icing in Wilbur’s hair.

Wilbur knows this not because he’d actually made an effort to keep track of where on his person icing ended up, but rather because, on the other side of the till, Tubbo is standing in front of him, brow furrowed at Wilbur’s fringe. Wilbur admittedly spent some time this morning perfecting the swoop of his fringe, but even he knows it’s not _that_ entrancing.

So, icing it is.

He politely ignores Tubbo’s stare and leans down to survey the baked goods behind the glass, zeroing in on the confidence cake and handing over a slice. Confidence is red, smooth and hardens well into fondant; more importantly, it’ll do wonders for Tubbo, who is bright and cheerful but sometimes retreats into himself. 

He watches amusedly as Tubbo immediately bites into the cake. Wilbur turns around to grab a napkin, and when he looks back to hand it to Tubbo, he’s happy to see that his posture has straightened and his expression is more open, easy. 

Tubbo smiles and pushes the napkin back at Wilbur. “You’ve got some icing-”, he explains, gesturing with the cake slice in Wilbur’s general direction. Wilbur looks down and realises that, in fact, there isn’t just icing in his hair but on his hands, his clothes, and even a spot on his shoes. Maybe the magic residue in the icing was attracted to him, as if recognising itself in the magic humming under his skin.

“Are you staying for a while, Tubbo?” Wilbur asks. “Your evil twin isn’t here today.”

Tubbo grins. “Tommy’s coming by later, I just wanted to get a head start on my English project.” He scrunches his nose in dismay; Wilbur suddenly recalls how Tubbo had been ranting about English lessons a few weeks ago while Tommy periodically stole pieces of his croissant. “I felt a lot worse about it before I came here though - Niki’s baking always makes me feel better. It’s a speaking project, those are the worst.”

Wilbur nods his head knowledgeably and agrees, even though, for all he knew, speaking projects could actually be the best thing since sliced bread - then again, he hadn’t exactly had a typical education, what with all the spellwork and terrifying broomstick lessons and, worst of all, potions class after potions class. The fact that Wilbur was dogshit at potions never seemed to matter. His parents had decided that their child was going to be a potion-brewer like them, and that was that. 

At least, it had been - until Wilbur had moved away and opened a bakery with Niki.

He’s never been prone to regret - Wilbur’s a firm believer of focusing so single-mindedly on the present that there’s no room for the guilt of the past to worm its way into his mind - but some days he comes close to thinking about what could’ve been.

The day before Valentine’s Day certainly qualifies. Wilbur maintains that it’s not regret, but today an ache has lodged itself under his ribcage and into his heart, pulsing painfully in time with every new couple or happy family that passes through his doors.

He doles out compassion _(burnt orange, good for coating cake pops)_ to a frosty couple, then tranquility _(mint green, smooth)_ to a stressed father of three, and, near closing time, courage _(yellow, makes for nice icing on sugar cookies)_ for a man with a ring-box poking out of his coat pocket. Each new arrival causes the claw around his heart to tighten a little more, and by closing time he feels suffocated. He thinks it might be loneliness.

He’s thought about sampling the bakery’s own supply before, of course. He used to spend nights poring over untidy scribbles of sheet music, the royal blue of musicality marzipan taunting him from his desk. In the end, he had always chucked it straight into the bin. His and Niki’s bakery helps people in small ways - an extra boost of confidence here, some conviction there - but Wilbur doesn’t trust the fact that he has both a) what he considers an addictive personality, and b) a direct supply to as many musicality - and happiness - pastries as he wants. He wonders, sometimes, if a smaller part of him thinks he doesn’t deserve happiness - after all, he’s spent so long grasping at the tender blooms of peace and contentment when there’s ready-made joy on hand - but he quickly pushes that thought out of mind. 

Instead, he looks over to where Tubbo is sitting, looking forlornly at the clock and beginning to pack up. Tommy hadn’t shown. Wilbur frowns, running through the possible reasons for his absence when-

-the bell hanging from the door chimes like a nightingale. Wilbur smiles, thinking back to how terribly long it had taken to finetune it, picking out the note and twisting the sound this way and that until its very essence had exuded calmness. For all that he’s atrocious at baking and potion making - ironic, for someone who works at a bakery - he loves sound manipulation, which was a supposedly rarer discipline, according to his parents (who were certainly more educated in all things magic than he was). He watches Tommy rush up to the till, arms akimbo as he gestures widely, launching into an explanation of why he’s so late. 

“Wilbur, hello! Listen, I know I normally drop by earlier but I’ve had the weirdest day - there were lots of women involved, which was obviously a plus, but-”

“Gremlin child.” Wilbur cuts him off, ignoring his spluttered protests, “Tubbo’s been sat there for an hour waiting for you to come help him with English. Go apologise.” He tries to sound stern, but can’t tell if it worked until Tommy’s expression turns contrite. Even so, he opens his mouth to argue.

“I don’t want to apologise, Will, I’m not a pussy,” he complains. “Anyway, couldn’t you have gone and helped him yourself if it was that important? Prick,” he adds under his breath, but it’s not mean-spirited.

“I’m literally on the clock right now, Tommy.” As it turns out, the day before Valentine's heralds the arrival of a storm of people searching for pretty, last-minute cakes in an attempt to avoid the ire of their significant other. 

“Well, that sounds like a _you_ problem, doesn’t it? Leave me alone to save Tubbo from English in peace.”

Wilbur doesn’t dignify that with a response, rolling his eyes and waving a hand towards the corner, where Tubbo was still sitting hunched over English. Tommy marches over to the table and throws himself unceremoniously into the chair, knocking off the “RESERVED: BIG MAN” sign perched at his place. Tubbo looks up, and the expression on his face is so clearly “thank god, you’re here” that Wilbur can’t bear to close up shop now - he lets them sit inside, and listens to their chatter with badly concealed fondness while he cleans.

——————

Wilbur pushes open the kitchen door and narrowly avoids getting his head thwacked by a flying rolling pin.

Niki grabs it out of the air and tuts at him. “How many times do I have to remind you to knock? I’m surprised you haven’t been knocked out by a whisk yet.”

She turns back to the countertop, and Wilbur takes a moment to take in the scene in front of him. Niki’s finishing off the baked goods for Valentine’s Day tomorrow - there’s a flurry of utensils around her as palette knives smooth out icing, dirty spoons speed to the sink and a broomstick dances around sweeping up spilled messes. Niki sprinkles a gold powder - bravery, Wilbur notes distantly - over heart-shaped sugar cookies and turns around to face him.

“I’ve just finished closing up out front, so we-”

She cuts him off, reaching up to pinch a strand of his hair with her thumb and forefinger. “How does icing even _get_ here?”

Wilbur straightens up, affronted. “Well, it’s not like you’re any better. I can see at least five different colours on you.” He reaches out to point, but she swats his hand away and turns back to the cookies.

“I’m almost done with this batch and then I’m going home,” she declares. “Did you know today I managed to get perseverance to form stiff peaks? We might have a lot of meringue tomorrow,” she adds, somewhat sheepishly.

“The more, the merrier,” Wilbur replies, but his mind is elsewhere. 

He’d spent so long when he was younger trying to achieve what Niki can do effortlessly; he’s by no means jealous of Niki - she’s amazing at what she does - but sometimes he can’t help but ruminate on his childhood. 

He had once tried to bake with George back in London, when they were both still too short to reach the ingredients on the highest shelf. George had produced an appetising banoffee pie with cheeriness mixed into the whipped cream. Wilbur, on the other hand, had cobbled together some “calmness” fudge - except that instead of an even brown, it had been dark blue, almost black, not due to overheating but rather something fundamentally wrong with the emotion itself, which Wilbur had unintentionally transformed into something closer to sorrow.

George, with all the impulsivity befitting a pre-teen, had snatched a piece and plopped it in his mouth before Wilbur could even react, brandishing a slice of his own pie at Wilbur. Wilbur had eaten it with reluctance. For the entirety of the next week, George had been inconsolable, and Wilbur had been too overcome by happiness from George’s pie to feel any guilt until it wore off a day later. 

Suffice to say, George had moved to America to greener pastures overseas, and Wilbur- well, Wilbur stood behind a till and very much did not involve himself with the baking process whatsoever. 

Now, he spies what he’s looking for behind Niki and reaches around her to grab his guitar case. “Just wanted to pick this up before I go,” he says.

Niki smiles at him and waves goodbye. He leaves her to her cookies.

——————

There’s a stray cat in the alleyway outside the bakery.

Wilbur sits down on the ground near it, but the cat keeps its distance. So he picks up his guitar and strums a few notes, humming softly. Wilbur always preferred sound over taste; the intricacies of melodies and the emotions within them were much easier to understand than baking. 

He reaches out mentally and tugs the melody one way, and is pleased to see the cat creep closer, eventually coming right up to him and nuzzling into his side as he continues to sing quietly. 

“Wilbur?”

Wilbur looks up and stops playing, surprised. The cat looks up too, as if annoyed at the interruption. There stands Tommy, of all people, awkwardly balancing a water dish in his hands, and looking like he regrets saying anything at all.

“Tommy? Why haven’t you gone home yet?” Wilbur looks between Tommy, the cat, and, finally, the water dish, and tilts his head. “Hold on, do you _know_ this cat?”

Tommy looks embarrassed, but holds his ground defiantly and says, “So what if I do? I fed him once and then he kept coming back and _looking_ at me, Wilbur. I’d be a bad person if I just ignored him.” He sets down the water dish, and the cat disentangles itself from Wilbur’s side to go paw at the water.

“Does he have a name, then? If you two are such good friends,” Wilbur says. 

Tommy hesitates. Wilbur waits. “...Dog.”

Wilbur blinks. “You- what?”

“His name is Dog, because if he can’t _be_ a dog then that’s the next best thing. How did you get him to like you so quickly?”

Wilbur processes this, and then wisely chooses to move on instead of trying to understand Tommy’s thought process. “Must be my natural charm,” he says, strumming another chord on the guitar. He grins as the cat pads back over to sit by him.

“Aw look, two little bitches,” Tommy says, grinning. 

Wilbur picks up a stray piece of cardboard off the ground and chucks it at Tommy, who dodges and shouts. Wilbur laughs at him, then looks back down to his guitar and begins to play again. It’s a song he hasn’t played in a long time, and, after a moment, Tommy comes to sit down next to him.

“You know, Wilbur, you’re pretty good at that guitar.”

Wilbur feels a warm fondness lodge itself in his heart, right next to the ache of loneliness and doubt and insecurity. He continues to play quietly for Tommy and Dog, and he feels those icy emotions begin to thaw as the sunset paints the alley in reds, pinks and yellows.

——————

When he gets home that night, he digs out old piles of sheet music that he hasn’t looked at in a long while. Not since before the days where he and Niki would stay up all night, giddy with the excitement of planning the opening of their bakery. 

He sits down and picks up the sheet on top of the pile. _Jubilee Line_. When he had first written these songs, he’d been sick of London smog and stifling parents and had poured out all his feelings into his sheet music before stuffing them into the darkest corner of his closet, out of sight and out of mind.

Now, though, he carefully tries out the first few chords and exhales, closing his eyes. The music doesn’t immediately bring him back to frowning parents, blackened pastries and long nights alone. Instead, he thinks of Tommy sitting next to him in an alley, and feels hope unfurl in his chest. Maybe he can take his old music and turn it into something better, stronger. The weight of the past is far less heavy as he reaches the song’s end.

That night, he dreams of heart-shaped cookies and cats with confusing names. He doesn’t think of London at all.

——————

Wilbur pushes open the door on Valentine’s Day to see Tommy and Tubbo in their usual corner, and a large line of people waiting for the till. Ranboo, their new hire (with a proclivity for teleportation), looks increasingly overwhelmed as he politely tells a woman why he _cannot, in fact, give you a discount, ma’am_. 

Checking his phone, Wilbur sees that George has sent a selfie of himself next to heart-shaped petit fours. He smiles and texts back, ignoring the little twinge in his heart at the reminder of the distance between him and George now. 

He swipes onto Techno’s message. Techno is also far away in the States, but they talk much more often than him and George. He’s sent Wilbur a picture of his dog with a heart-patterned blanket draped over him, along with the caption _I know you’re probably stressing today, so here’s a picture of Floof_. Wilbur smiles widely and texts back with lots of exclamation marks, then spares a second to sigh at the fact that he’s so predictably down today. 

He relieves a grateful Ranboo of his shift and settles in to work, taking a deep breath before facing the onslaught of eager customers. He sells some of Niki’s perseverance meringue to a downtrodden-looking woman, and then has a nice talk with Fundy, who leaves with his monthly order of cupcakes iced with yellow contentment.

The hours blur together as he serves people on a kind of autopilot. At least, that’s his explanation for why it takes him so long to tune in to the fact that there’s a boy standing by Tommy and Tubbo’s table, arguing furiously with Tommy. Tubbo is hunched into his chair, looking desperately like he’d rather be anywhere else.

Wilbur doesn’t hesitate before striding over to catch the tail end of their conversation.

“You can fuck right off if you walked over here to poke fun at Tubbo, you asshole!”

“Tommy, it’s okay, just-”

“Swearing at me doesn’t make you sound cool, Tommy, you just sound loud and annoying. Not that that’s a change from usual, no wonder Tubbo’s the only person who can stand you at school-”

“Shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Tommy’s voice, horribly, cracks in the middle of his sentence and Wilbur decides he’s heard enough.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he says, stepping forward, and his voice comes out cold and controlled.

The boy barely spares him a glance before saying, “I’m a paying customer, you can’t make me leave,” in a self-satisfied tone.

Wilbur steps forward, leans down and whispers in the boy’s ear. “I said, _leave_.” He puts power behind the statement. He hasn’t compelled someone for years, but he can feel the way he’s almost subconsciously sculpting the frequencies of his voice so that they persuade the other boy supernaturally. 

Sure enough, the bully turns and leaves without another word, leaving all three of them worked up in his wake. Tommy turns to Tubbo and mutters “you okay?” Tubbo nods.

“Look, I don’t know what that was about,” Wilbur says, and pauses, momentarily unsure of how to continue. Neither Tommy nor Tubbo have ever mentioned trouble at school before; he’s in uncharted waters. “Are you guys okay?”

“Of course we are, Wilbur,” Tommy scoffs, but then looks up at him with something vulnerable in his eyes. “Sit with us?”

So Wilbur does.

He glances behind him and sees Niki chatting away at the till with a purple-haired girl - Minx, a regular, he recalls - and so he turns back around to join in the conversation. They talk for a while about various topics - school, CS:GO, and the bakery. At one point, to Wilbur’s growing concern, Tommy and Tubbo seriously discuss renting a tank. 

Wilbur jumps in quickly to break up that plan before it can fully form. “Are you guys liking your pastries?” he says, gesturing at the pain au chocolats imbued with strength in front of them.

“Well, they’re fucking magic, aren’t they? No shit we like them,” Tommy says offhandedly, and Wilbur chokes on his water. 

When he recovers, Tommy is staring at him, unimpressed. “How- how did you find out?” Wilbur whispers, feeling winded. The uncomfortable tickling of anxiety is starting to take root in his lungs. There’s regulations against non-magics knowing about magic, Wilbur knows, although they tend to be less enforced the further away from the capital you go.

Tubbo says ashamedly, “We snuck into the back once to find you - it was that day you were off sick, remember? Yeah, well there were bowls and cutlery floating around in the air baking shit without anyone else in the room. So that kind of tipped us off.”

“Tubbo! We had an agreement to never tell him we snuck back there!”

“What do you mean we _had an agreement-_ you just told him we know his bakery is magic!”

“Yeah, but it’s not the same when _I_ do it-”

Wilbur butts in. “Neither of you think it’s,” he falters, _(neither of you think I’m a bad person, an awful friend, for hiding this from you?)_ , “weird? Or- or freaky or whatever?” They don’t sound angry at him, but he has to make sure.

“No, man, I’m just surprised it tastes this good, to be honest,” Tommy dismisses, waving a hand. He picks up his pain au chocolat and takes a massive bite.

Wilbur smiles. “I can’t take credit for the actual baking; that’s all Niki. I tend more towards sound.” 

At that, Tommy meets his eyes and gives him a small smile, and Wilbur knows they’re both thinking about yesterday, playing guitar in a grotty alleyway under the fading sunlight. From there, they fall back into easy conversation, and Wilbur settles back in his chair, listening to Tommy and Tubbo chatter away while Niki handles the last Valentine’s Day stragglers at the till.

There’s an easy warmth seeping into his bones; he couldn’t have hoped to find a better family when he first moved out of London to take a risk with Niki. And, with a little jolt, Wilbur realises that he’s found exactly that: family. It’s in the way Tommy smacks his hand away when Wilbur leans over to ruffle his hair. It’s in the way Tubbo breaks off a piece of his pain au chocolat and silently slides it over to Wilbur when his stomach rumbles. It’s in the way Niki meets his eyes over the till and sends him a small, knowing smile. 

Valentine’s Day hadn’t been so bad after all, Wilbur reflects. It turns out he just needed to spend it with the right people, and they were right in front of him.


End file.
